Dropbox's New 'Paper' Is Yet Another All-in-One Work Tool

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Dropbox's New 'Paper' Is Yet Another All-in-One Work Tool

Dropbox

I'm going to describe an idea, and you have to name the company behind it (and no cheating by reading the headline). The mission is, and I quote, "to simplify the way people work together." It's primarily a collaboration tool, where teams—especially at small businesses, but eventually anyone—work together in a single, shared space to get things done. You can create documents, chat, and keep everything in an easily searchable repository. Got it yet?

Nope, it's not Slack. Or Evernote. Or Google Docs. Or Box. Or Lync. It's Dropbox! The company that has spent almost a decade keeping all your files in perfect sync is now launching its second product, along with a re-branding of sorts. The new product is called Paper. An initial beta was called Notes, but Dropbox decided that didn't feel big enough. Paper felt appropriately wide-ranging, says Matteus Pan, a product manager at Dropbox. "We love the name because physical paper is simple, it's flexible, it's a creative service."

More broadly, Dropbox doesn't want you to think of it as a storage company anymore. It's hoping to leave files behind at long last. It's a collaboration company now. A lot of people know Dropbox, and a lot of people will try Paper as a result, but Dropbox is late to this party. And it's hard to tell how much ground it can make up—even if it does look pretty sleek.

The Writer's Room

Paper feels like a cross between Google Docs and Medium. It's an ultra-minimal text editor—every new document offers space for a title and a body, and nothing else to look at. You go to paper.dropbox.com (which right now won't get you anywhere unless you're in the beta), and just start typing.

There's some basic formatting in the document—you can write in Markdown, or use sub-heds and bold text. But that's all obscured, in the hope you'll turn off your internal font freak and just start typing. You can add images, too, dragging and dropping them around the page or making one full-bleed on the page with a single click. If you write lines of code, it'll automatically format and style them as code. Or create a to-do list, and assign tasks to other people by @-mentioning them in the document. Or paste a Dropbox-stored file in, and it'll automatically be available to everyone shared on your Paper document.

As 'all your files everywhere' has become utterly commoditized, Dropbox is looking for new ways to figure out how to extend its competency into new places.

The whole goal of Paper is to make creating, maintaining, and sharing these kinds of documents easier. Lots of people can be in a single document simultaneously, each working in the same or different spots. Step-by-step version history is available, and each user gets a running feed of changes made to documents they're involved with. It all sounds a lot like Google Docs, really, right down to the nested comments that can run down the right side of your document. The dashboard of documents you've opened and created looks familiar too. But Paper at least has stickers (even wizard-rainbow stickers) and emoji, which is nice.

Dropbox also takes the collaboration bits a little further. Each person is represented by a cursor, and their name is placed next to everything they create. Dropbox calls this Attribution, and says it makes it easier to figure out who did what, and when. You can look at the list of people you've shared the document with, to see who's opened it and who's slacking. When you go to your dashboard, you'll see who's currently in every document. "That makes this really be a collaborative work hub," Pan says. He says early teams love knowing who's working on what, that quickly. You can't hide from Dropbox Paper.

It's About Your Work, Not the Tool

The big upside here is search. Dropbox is really good at file search, and by putting everything in Paper it gets even better. You can search the content of documents, the documents attached to those documents, and all the way down the list. Or search by user to find that weird document Julie sent you that was helpfully named Untitled.

Dropbox

People work in different forms with different people all at the same time, and having a multimedia-friendly place to work together can be powerful. As she walked through a demo, Christina Cacioppo, the product manager for Paper, was constantly referencing the ugliness of a traditional workflow. Everything's buried in someone's email inbox, or stored only on their hard drive, or nested into some impossible-to-find folder. Dropbox for Business has been about making those files more accessible, and Paper hopes it can replace your files altogether.

Yet for all the stated power of these sheets of paper, the Dropbox approach is to make everything as simple as possible. "The idea is to really let the work people are doing, the images and text, shine through," Cacioppo says, "and not the tool. In other products, you have toolbars and menus and formatting all over the place, and there's none of that here." There are only a few options, because they didn't want to let people overwhelm themselves with choices.

Paper is still in beta. Early beta. Paper is expanding today from a few thousand people to a few thousand teams, but won't be widely available for a while. There's a lot of development work to do, too. Among the features Cacioppo wouldn't say Dropbox is working on but hinted Dropbox is definitely working on: a mobile app for Paper beyond the current mobile web support, and a way to build a task list out of all the things assigned to you in your many notes. They're still working on how to show more specifically who's working on what, and who's changed what.

The new app comes at an odd time for Dropbox. As "all your files everywhere" has become utterly commoditized, the company is looking for new ways to figure out how to extend its competency into new places. But these are places many of its competitors, even the big ones, have been for a while now. Slack, Google Docs, OneNote, and others have big leads. Dropbox is really, really good at syncing things. Who knows how much that matters anymore?